


A Theory of Reversals

by Trismegistus (Lebateleur)



Category: Doctrine of Labyrinths - Sarah Monette
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Sex Magic, Yuleporn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-21 17:56:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17047880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lebateleur/pseuds/Trismegistus
Summary: The Celebrants of the Gardens have healed Felix, but it seems he may still suffer from a deeper malaise.(Takes place after the conclusion ofMelusineand diverges from canon there.)





	A Theory of Reversals

**Author's Note:**

  * For [GlassRain](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GlassRain/gifts).



**Mildmay**

About a septad-day later we were out in the gardens, Felix holding court over his circle of admirers and me sort of hovering off to the side half-forgotten, on account of not being a hocus. Him and Astyanax were going back and forth on some point or other, and even an annemer like me could tell it was so obscure it was the kinda thing to bore anyone to tears to have to sit and listen to it. But they were all watching rapt as anything, along of Felix being the one doing the talking. He has that affect on people. I ain’t faulting him for it or nothing. It is what it is.

And when you get down to it, it was the reason I was there too, cause you can be sure as shit an annemer like me ain’t of no use to these folks, and that would’ve been true even if I’d had charisma like his rolling off of me in waves, which I didn’t. But when Felix poked his head into my room that morning and said they were going to the Garden of Radiant Elucidation and wouldn’t I like to come too, and then smiled that smile of his, powers, I was as helpless as any of them. So I went. 

And now here I was, staying just near enough to to be polite but not close enough that any of them’d take notice and feel obligated to try and include me in the conversation. Cause the thing was, one or two of them might’ve. I think they felt bad, about not letting me see Felix and not believing me about my leg, and like they owed it to me to try and make up for it. I’m not saying I preferred being scorned, but I ain’t good at casual conversation and even less good at making nice for niceness’ sake, and so I figured it was better for everyone all around if I just sort of hung around on the edges so they didn’t feel obligated to bother me none.

And even with everything they’d done for my leg in the last septad and a half—and they’d done a lot—it still hurt like a bitch to walk on it, and even if it hadn’t I didn’t care to go limping around in public for everyone to watch with this cane I had to use now to keep myself up. So I mostly just pretended to be interested in the bees and the flowers, or stared up at the sky and wondered what the fuck I was gonna do now. Cause it was clear as day they’d let Felix stick around for as long as he wanted to, but eventually people were gonna stop feeling like they still had anything to make up to me for and start wondering why I wasn’t doing nothing to earn my keep. And all the things I used to do to earn my keep weren’t gonna be of no use to me here, even if I hadn’t been a crip. Their society didn’t have much use for thieves or murderers. 

So I don’t know why it was that I heard him say the word, but I did. _Nera_. I don’t even know what they’d been talking about that made Felix mention it, but you better believe it got their attention. Astyanax shut right up, and the ones that had been paying attention to Felix but not to what he’d been saying went on high alert. I mean, you could have heard a hair from Saint Cetherel’s beard drop, it got that quiet.

“What?” Felix asked, looking from face to face, and powers, you’d think he was a little kid whose favorite toy just got taken away for no reason, the way the air went out of him now they weren’t staring at him in adoration. But I knew better. When people got all watchful like that you either got watchful right back, or you let them get you.

“What do you know of Nera?” asked one of the admirers cautiously, after no one else seemed willing to pipe up. _Hagiosthos_ , my mind supplied.

Felix blinked, and tried flashing his smile again. “Very little,” he said. “We passed through it—or rather, the ruins of it—on our way to the Kekropian shore.” If he’d been hoping that’d calm them down, it didn’t do nothing of the kind.

“You passed through it and came here,” said Hagiosthos slowly, with a face like he was chewing on something he didn’t much like. The rest of them were looking from one to the other like a bunch of kept thieves who knew they were about to get caught out in the middle of doing something their keeper wouldn’t like.

“I will go inform the Celebrant Lunar,” said one of the other acolytes—a short girl with wild tufts of hair that escaped its plaits in all directions. 

“Inform them of what?” Felix asked. But none of them would say anything more until the Celebrant got there.

**Felix**

Upon Xanthippe’s arrival in the garden, we were immediately ushered off _en masse_ to the council hall that occupied an entire side of the grand plaza. Once everyone was seated, she began without preamble. “This is gravely unfortunate. That you concealed your presence in Nera from us upon your arrival changes many things.”

“Concealed?” I could not restrain my exasperation at the accusation, and found I did not wish to. “What was there to conceal? We knew nothing of the place before stumbling through it on our way here—” This was not entirely accurate, but I did not see how the distinction made any difference, given the circumstances. I had been mad when I insisted we go there, and Mildmay had only followed—reluctantly—to protect me. 

“Nevertheless,” she said. “You were there—the fact cannot be changed _now_. What is to be done about it, however, will depend upon many things. And so we must know everything that occurred while you were in that place.” I pretended not to notice Mildmay stiffen beside me.

“I will tell you what I can,” I said clearly and very deliberately, meeting each of their eyes in turn, “although I need hardly remind you that my own mental condition at the time was less than sound.” For what was there to hide? They had seen my madness, and the curse that had nearly swallowed Mildmay whole. What were the poor long-dead, suffering souls of Nera in comparison to _that_?

Xanthippe inclined her head. Mildmay drew in a deep slow breath, but said nothing. 

“We were in Nera for an afternoon and a night. We saw no other men, and there was nothing for miles in any direction but stones and grass and empty sky. In my madness, I could hear the voices of the dead.” A few of the acolytes gasped. I ignored them. “They begged me to help them.”

“And when they begged you, what did you do?” Xanthippe asked.

“We made a maze,” I said. “And we led them to its center and set them free.”

**Mildmay**

And that’s when all hell broke loose. You’d of thought Felix had opened his mouth and spat a cloud of hornets straight into the room, the way everyone started waving their arms and bawling over each other and carrying on. It took a while before Xanthippe managed to get a handle on the situation, along of it being utter saint-fucked chaos, but eventually she got everyone mostly calmed down enough so that we could talk again without having to raise our voices much.

“This is troubling indeed,” she said once she had. I mean, those are the words that came out of her mouth, but you could tell from the way she said them that what she really meant was, fuck me sideways till I cry, and that’s just about how I felt about the situation too.

Felix gave her his worst imperious stare. I mean, the full-on Mirador hocus works. “I fail to see that we committed any error,” he said, and I swear, the temperature in the room dropped about twenty degrees the way he said it. I mean, you could just about see everyone’s breath starting to mist in the air, it was that cold. “Those ghosts were no danger to us, and they were in pain. We laid them to rest and there is nothing more to be said on the matter.”

I felt for sure there probably was, just like I was equally sure Xanthippe was gonna tell us all kinds of ways from sideways just how wrong Felix was. A moment later, she did. And that’s when we found out we’d built a royal highway straight into death and forgot to close the door on the way out.

**Felix**

It was not easy, to say the least, for me to grasp the thaumaturgic principles at work, a task made no simpler by the fact that every celebrant and acolyte in the room had an opinion on the matter and was not shy about sharing it, at volume, over his or her fellows. Cabaline doctrine abhorred necromancy; did not even allow for the existence of ghosts, and so I was left navigating an entirely unfamiliar terrain, all while working with shadows of memories whose reliability even I questioned.

“But that makes no _sense,_ ” I said at last, running my hands through my hair for what must have been the hundredth time that evening. Malkar would have flogged me or worse had he seen it, but I was beyond his reach here, and I needed some outlet for my frustration. I was not accustomed to being the untutored voice in the room where magic was concerned, and I found the experience unfamiliar and disorienting. “If the foundational principle you describe is correct, the physical destruction of the labyrinth should prevent the dead from retracing their steps to the material plane.”

“Nevertheless, a living sacrifice always followed celebrants into the maze to seal the exit,” said Xanthippe. “The historical accounts in our libraries are all very clear on that point.”

Mildmay had been silent thus far, but now he leaned back in his chair, wholly unimpressed. “It ever occur to you that some of the stuff in your archives might be wrong? Just because people’ve told each other something for ages, that don’t necessarily make it true. And from what you’ve said about these people from Nera, they weren’t the nicest folks. Maybe they thought they needed someone to go into the labyrinth and die, or maybe their hocuses just liked killing folks for the hell of it. Seems to me there’s all kinds of reasons they could have decided someone had to die in their mazes without anyone strictly needing to.”

There was a vehemence to Mildmay’s words that I did not understand. When I turned to him, he studiously prevented me from catching his eye. All the while, Xanthippe was watching us closely in a way I did not like. To distract her, I said, “If you are correct that the labyrinth functioned like a kind of waterway to channel the dead toward their destination, then its physical destruction should serve to fill in the channel. A living sacrifice might only have been necessary to block the passageway if the labyrinth was to be left intact afterward.”

One of the celebrants, a solar, I think, cocked his head to the side. I did not know him; he had never joined our salons in the garden and had seemed wholly unimpressed with me, even before I had admitted my ignorance regarding the doctrine of labyrinths. “There could be something to your theory,” he said slowly. “There are, of course, contradictions and lacunae in the accounts. And certainly, the Lucretians’ knowledge of thaumaturgie was primitive compared to our own.

“But it is also true that the dreams of many of my house’s acolytes have been unsettled since the weeks before your arrival in Nephele. And the gardens that you frequent have not flourished as they should.”

“And you’re saying Felix is doing that?” said Mildmay, and the most seasoned of the Mirador’s courtiers would have found it difficult to withstand the onslaught of his skepticism. But the man merely inclined his head to Mildmay— _yes, I am_ —and turned to Xanthippe.

“Nera and its surroundings are cursed ground,” she said. “It is verboten for any to go there, and so all those with practical experience in these matters have been dead for centuries. But the records do suggest that if the way is not properly closed once the labyrinth has been walked, that the flow of energies through it may be reversed, like the changing of the ocean’s tides. The effects would manifest slowly at first, like water leaking through a crack. Small perversions of the natural order that should be readily visible through simple observation.” 

She turned to me. “Have you noticed any such occurrences?”

I thought of the blossom that had withered at the touch of my hand yesterday, the witchlights I had conjured the previous night that blazed red instead of green and burned with a cold so intense it sent frost creeping across the ceiling. “None whatsoever,” I said.

 

The night had grown old before I made my way to my brother’s room. The moon was already setting as I moved through the halls, careful lest the sound of my boot heels on the floor bring a curious celebrant to the door to see who passed by so late.

But although the Garden’s scholars went to bed with the setting of the sun, its torches burned throughout the night so that I had little trouble finding my way. All that delayed me was the knowledge of what I was about to do, and my crippling disgust that I meant to do it.

The door to Mildmay’s room opened easily on oiled hinges when I turned my hand on the knob. I had begun to rehearse what I would say, would do, even before our farce of an audience with Xanthippe had concluded. Over and over, I had watched myself slip into his room and cross the floor to his bed, watched as I laid a hand on his shoulder. I would wake him without startling him. And then, while he was still groggy with sleep, I would tell him what I needed from him. 

His bed was empty. 

I deflated, at an utter lost. I had known that he had slipped from these rooms even when they locked him in, even when he was in such pain he could barely walk. I should not have been surprised to find him gone now. _Stupid_ , I told myself, in something very much like Malkar’s voice. For all my mental preparations, I had not considered the possibility that he would not be here, had not accounted for it in my plans, and having failed in my efforts now, I did not think I would be cruel enough to attempt them again.

“Couldn’t sleep?”

I flinched, but managed to stop myself from turning and fleeing down the hallway. There was no sign of him in the room, for all that he was clearly in it, and for a moment I wondered if I had hallucinated the whole thing in my distress. 

“No,” I said, and cringed again at the querulousness in my voice. Everything was unraveling before my eyes, and I could do little more than stand and watch.

He shifted, and was suddenly visible in the chair where my eyes had sought him out a moment before and not found him. The haze from the window threw him into profile and I choked down a gasp of desire at the sight. I closed the door quietly behind me and crossed to perch on the corner of his bed. The bedclothes were still perfectly arranged atop the mattress. He had not touched his bed this night.

I smoothed the fabric of my trousers across my thighs, and was momentarily caught off guard once more by the absence of my rings. I looked away, to his silhouette, to the closed door, to the patterned tiles of the floor and began. “The Celebrant Lunar was wrong about Nera,” I said.

“I know. The souls that went through that maze ain’t coming back. I’m no hocus, but even I could sense that.” His tone was rich with indignation. He deserves better than me, I thought.

We sat for a moment. “The truth is,” I began, and found I could not continue. 

He waited silently, without judgment, for me to continue. In his undeserved patience I found the courage to forge on. “The truth is, they were wrong to believe that Nera has anything to do with the abomination I have brought into the Gardens—but I have brought one. 

“When I told you earlier about... About how Malkar...” I did not finish the sentence.

He turned then so that the moonlight fell on his face. In the flatness of his expression I read another absence of judgment, knew that he had meant for me to see it, and was grateful. He waited, giving me the space I needed to continue.

“The rape—the sex—allowed him to open a conduit through me. That was what he used to channel my power to destroy the Virtu.” I steeled myself and went on. “He did not close it, when he finished. I do not think he anticipated my madness, or at least the obstacle it would prevent to his continuing to manipulate me by that means.

“But I think he knows of my cure, and means to reestablish the connection. It’s his presence the celebrants sense, and I fear they are not wrong when they say that it will only grow stronger over time. He is not finished with me yet, and he will bring an evil to these gardens far greater than anything they are equipped to deal with.”

“So how do we stop him?” There was no fear in his question, or even resignation, and for a moment I was crippled with envy at his simple ability to persevere. What could I have been had I learned to meet the challenges confronting me head-on, instead of through the seduction and guile first Keeper, then Malkar, had beaten into me.

“The Troians are wrong about the source of the blight I have brought into the Gardens,” I began carefully. “But I believe the principles they outlined regarding thaumaturgic flows through labyrinths apply here as well. If I undo what Malkar did to me, it could block the channel he opened.”

“You can’t undo what he did to you.” 

“No. Yes. I can, in a way.” I hated myself for my flustered response, the way heat flushed into my face at the flat anger in his voice—anger on my behalf, and of which I was about to prove myself wholly undeserving. “That is, I believe that if I undo what he did to me—recreate it in reverse—I can reverse its effects upon me.” And of course, what he had done to me was rape me.

“But it ain’t like you haven’t fucked anyone since you got better,” he said, and for a moment I was livid at the casual way he referenced my liaisons, despite the fact that I had spared them little more regard myself. A moment later it washed a way on a tidal wave of nausea like the waters of the Sim crashing over my head, because now we had come to the moment where I would tell him what I needed from him, and betray his trust again. “So why hasn’t it worked yet, if it was the sort of thing that was gonna work at all?”

“That the act of sex alone is insufficient to sever the connection.” In my mental rehearsals of this moment I had been matter-of-fact, seductive, even wittily nonchalant. But now I found I could not even meet his eyes. “I must recreate and undo what Malkar did to me.”

“Fuck me sideways till I cry,” he breathed. “So you’re saying...”

“For it to be effective, it must be someone whom I trust.”

**Mildmay**

I didn’t ask him if there was anyone else who fit the bill. We both knew there wasn’t. And the horrible thing about it, the fuck me sideways till I’m blind thing was, I would do it. I knew I’d do whatever it took to keep him safe, had known it as far back as Kekropia, knew it the same way I knew I was gonna take another breath the moment this one was done. So there was no two ways about it. He'd told me and I was gonna do it. It was just that simple. 

“I know that what I am asking of you is beyond the pale,” he began. “And so if you do not wish to—”

“Powers, just stop, okay?” I didn’t think I could look him straight in the face, but I could still manage to give him the hairy eyeball from sort of off to the side, and so I did. The way he was sitting there on the edge of the bed, with his hands and their crazy hocus tattoos twisted together like he thought they were gonna grow a mind of their own and strangle him if he let them go, it was just too much. 

“It ain’t a question of wishing or not wishing. If that’s what we gotta do, then we will. And I ain’t gonna let myself think about it too close, along of it being crazy hocus stuff and—” my voice cracked and I let the rest of the sentence just sort of die off right there. He knew what the rest of it was same as I did, anyway.

 

Felix had this particular place in mind where he wanted us to go, and it took awhile for us to get out there, along of it being on the dead other side of the Gardens and me not moving so fast these days. Turns out what he had in mind was this little stone building with a dome on the top and vines growing all over it. It looked old and like the sort of place for doing spooky hocus shit and something I’d normally be all too happy to steer clear of. It gave you the creeping horrors to look at.

“Kethe, what is that thing?” I asked, sort of under my breath and more to myself than anything, but he heard me and answered.

“The Omphalos,” he said. 

And then, cause I ain't ever learned to leave well enough alone, I said, “What’s an ‘omphalos?’” Only for once, he didn’t tear into me for not knowing about something he thought everyone should have known and only said, “It’s a navel—a scar marking the former connection of one plane to another.” And this time I knew better than to ask him anything else and kept my thrice-damned mouth shut.

We ducked between two of the columns and I could tell there wasn’t much inside to look at, even if there’d been any light to see by, which there wasn’t. Just some old stones, all kinda slippery and smooth from having a bunch of feet walking over them for ages, and a patch of moss in the center under this little circular hole in the ceiling. And that was it. 

Felix walked a few feet toward the center of the dome and stopped. Then he turned and looked at me. It was like a brick to the face, being stared at like that. I mean, like his eyes were just eating me alive. Fear and desire all mixed up on his face, and he was letting me see it exactly as it was happening to him, in a way he’d never done aside from when he’d been down deep in the well and hadn't realized he was letting anyone in that far. I hoped to fuck he couldn’t tell how lightheaded I was, cause it was like a septad and ten iron bands were wrapped around my chest and I couldn’t hardly breathe. 

“I want you to watch me undress,” he said. 

I swallowed and nodded, along of not trusting myself to say any words.

**Felix**

I undressed slowly, carefully, and without taking my eyes from his face. Even in the darkness I could tell he’d gone white as a sheet. His face wore none of the expressions I’d learned to recognize upon it over the last weeks. I could see his pulse thrumming in his throat. 

Once I divested myself of my clothing I took a step, and then another, toward him, until we were standing inches apart. The night air was cool, but I could feel heat pouring off my body in waves. He licked his lips, an unconscious gesture, and it took a supreme act of will not to throw myself upon him then and there. But that was not what we had come here to do.

A thin, hairline crease appeared between his brows and then grew until his whole face cracked open like a child’s. “Felix,” he said, and for a moment I thought he meant to back out of his commitment, and I could hardly have faulted him for it, but then the words came pouring out of him in a torrent of confusion. “I said I’d do anything for you, and I mean it. But I’m gonna need your help.” He raised his hands in a sort of apologetic half-gesture, then let them drop, limply, to his side.

I had been one of Melusine’s most accomplished whores, even before Malkar purchased me and trained me to his exacting specifications. I smiled and placed a finger over his lips, and watched them part beneath it. And then I placed my own lips to his ear and told him exactly what I wanted him to do to me, what I had wanted him to do for longer, I thought, than I remembered.

He was panting and dazed when I finished. I was trembling, sick with a disorienting mix of eagerness and need and fear. I trailed my hands down his chest, his thighs, as I went down on one knee, then the other, and lowered myself onto the altar stone at the center of the Omphalos. It was an ancient thing, older, I thought, than the Gardens themselves, and the carpet of moss that covered its crumbling marble was soft beneath my back.

Gazing at the sky through the occulus above me, I slid first one arm, then the other along moss and stone until all four of my limbs lay as if pinioned against the ground, although this time nothing held me there beyond my choice to mimic what Malkar had done to me. 

I heard a faint crunch of gravel and rustle of cloth as Mildmay struggled to his knees beside me. A moment later, I felt the pressure of his palm against my wrist. “You doin’ okay?” he asked. 

I squeezed my eyes shut and nodded.

“Powers, Felix, you don’t need to—”

“I do,” I said, and now that my hand had been freed by his touch, I slid my fingers along my torso and flank, and between my legs. Mildmay crouched frozen like a man entranced as I penetrated myself, and because his eyes never left my face I told him, slowly and carefully, and with desire thickening every syllable, what I imagined him doing to me with each stroke of my fingers. 

For the first time in my life, I begged a man to fuck me. Not because I was being paid to simulate desire, or because it was the culmination of a seduction, or because I had no choice and knew my agony would only end with his climax, but because I wanted him atop me, eager and desperate to possess. Mildmay groaned, face twisting beyond recognition, and finally, he mounted me.

I had wanted him to be swift and hard, and he was. I knotted my fingers in his hair and dragged his head down to me. His eyes locked on mine, lips pulled back from his teeth in a grimace and I nodded, licked my lips, beyond any words with which to tell him what I needed from him. It didn’t matter. He rode me faster, grinding my buttocks into the earth and grit below them, and with each stinging thrust I felt something rotted and corrupt being pushed out of me, absorbed back into the Omphalos and the earth and replaced by the slick of sweat and the smell of our sex.

Mildmay was moaning—“Oh Kethe, oh Powers”—as I thrashed beneath him, whimpering and cursing and cajoling him until he pushed me up and over into a climax that left me scoured clean and empty as the curve of the dome above us.

He rolled off and collapsed next to me, and we lay there for a time while our breathing slowed and our sweat dried to salt crust on our skin. “That do what you needed it to?” he said at last.

“Yes,” I said. “He’s gone.” And he was. I could feel his absence the same way I had felt the absence of the ghosts at Nera.

“That’s good.” 

“Yes,” I said again, and leaned back, eyes shut, as another wave of relief washed over me.

“We should go back. Probably a bad idea to let anyone find us out here, like this.” It was an eminently reasonable statement, on the surface. And there was nothing different about his voice, but something in the way he said the words warned me. 

I turned to find him watching me, face a careful blank, but his eyes gave him away. I recognized that look. I had worn it myself all too many times after I had enjoyed fucking someone and then regretted it, and I knew how quickly disgust and self-loathing could take root in that void. I lifted a hand and placed it against his cheek, watched his eyes widen and breathing quicken. We lay there for a while longer, while dawn lightened the sky around us.

**Author's Note:**

> Dear Glassrain,
> 
> Happy Yuletide! Thank you for the great prompts and the chance to write in this fandom--it was so much fun to revisit these characters. I hope you enjoy reading this!


End file.
